Lag

[MisterBobbyPin]

How do you make sure that your forum isn't laggy? Themes and design are what I find contribute most to lag so how should you make sure that your site isn't laggy?

 

[Arantor]

Google Pagespeed - identify the things that are slow and problematic. Big images are the usual worst offender - either compress harder or rethink the design, use WebP where you can (not all images suit), getting image sizes into the markup helps with layout shift etc.

But keeping the time-to-first-byte (i.e. how long the server takes to do anything) down is important, more than a lot of people give it credit for.

Also look out for scripts loaded from offsite e.g. if you run analytics, ads etc.

 

[Cory]

I will sometimes use the Network tab in my web developer tools to see what resources are taking the longest to load, but that's just a minor thing you can do. There are so many tools on the web to help guide you through speeding up your site.

 

[Arantor]

I will sometimes use the Network tab in my web developer tools to see what resources are taking the longest to load, but that's just a minor thing you can do. There are so many tools on the web to help guide you through speeding up your site.

Pagespeed will do that for you, just plug the URL in and watch - and it'll tell you which is slowest, and how quickly things load on both mobile and desktop. Chrome also has a version built in, but I prefer to get their site to do it, as I think that's more representative of real user conditions, nothing in cache etc.

 

[Tracy]

I honestly don't put a lot of weight into Google PageSpeed any longer. There are better choices out their that are more realistic.
GTMetrix and PingDom are two that come immediately to mind.
The irony with PageSpeed... one big thing they ding my site on - Google CDN, Google Fonts, Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

 

[Arantor]

I solve this by not using Google CDN (that's what Cloudflare is for), I rehost the fonts locally (since just about everything on Google Fonts is SIL licensed so you can just download the ones you need), and I don't really care about the analytics from GA, and anything I want in GTM I can do myself anyway.

Shafts me sideways at work though because all my customers want all the analytics, sometimes multiple on a site and then they complain that Google is dinging them for PageSpeed. Well, duh.

 

[Cory]

Is Lighthouse installed in Google Chrome dev tools by default? I thought I had to install it, but I don't quite remember. That's another useful tool.

 

[Arantor]

Yes it is, it used to be an extension but it's now bundled by default. Thing is, it's the same thing as Pagespeed with a slightly different interface.